Many of Fontaines’ key traits remain: the ability of this young Dublin outfit to retread familiar post-punk ground but with a tensile urgency all their own; and the sardonic Irish tones of Grian Chatten, whose affected blankness speaks volumes.

The writing here is bleak, self-excoriating and largely excellent.

The bull horn power of Odetta and Bessie Smith’s sly blues are other touchstones on an agile, emotional record.

Having explored the darker side of the dancefloor, Nymph finds Muise experimenting with its more irreverent aspects.

An affecting album of depth and beauty.

Key to it all is intoner Aidan Moffat – “singer” would be pushing it. ... Indispensable, too, is Malcolm Middleton, who supplies musical raw material that he and Moffat work into oxymoronic excellence – cheap, tinny beats and thousand-yard-stare guitars, elevated by strings and saxophone.

Its blend of historical drama, ballad ghosts and philosophical memoir is compelling, made as intimate as if it were in your own skull by Polwart’s warm, wise, attention-commanding voice.

Thirty years into his career, Warm shows that Tweedy is as absorbing as ever.

Black Flowers, one of several tracks rooted in nature, typifies his songwriting prowess, its cryptic lyrics twinned with a gorgeous melody that is both pristine and familiar.

Highlights abound, but a thrilling Aerial and a sumptuous Top of the City deserve particular acclaim.

Chatten’s vocals and writerly voice are instantly recognisable – declamatory on the three-legged wooze of Last Time Every Time Forever, or folk-adjacent on The Score. All of the People, meanwhile, is a bitter broadside against the kind of false friends the singer in a successful rock band might have to contend with.

Davies has given a powerful, challenging voice to her grief. Great music doesn’t necessarily come from great suffering, but if you’ve the strength for the job, it certainly can.

The mood is prayerful and contemplative, the music a mix of synth drones, Krishna-style chants and Coltrane’s poised, yearning vocals.

[The Ballad Of Darren] finds late-life Blur on eloquent, emotional form. It’s an album that often looks back, while summoning textures and nuances that only add to their toolkit.

These songs about love and existential sorrow feel purposely airy and unanchored – there’s no percussion – mirroring the psychological freefall of recent times. Ironically, though, they firm up the parallels between Lindeman and fellow complex Canadian, Joni Mitchell.

Across 32 tracks it tries to capture the experience of an era from all sides.

By turns gritty and poetic, its words “scattered like teeth”, it’s also a real original.

Andrew Fearn’s soundscapes, meanwhile, improve with each album. Particularly potent is the ominous post-punk bassline he deploys on OBCT; even what sounds suspiciously like a kazoo solo towards the end can’t puncture its sense of menace.

Rare, Forever rewards engaged listening, though, and intriguingly it’s the classical and jazz influences that are most persuasive, particularly on album bookends Ecce! Ego! and All I See Is You, Velvet Brown, and Mothra’s majestic orchestral techno crescendo.

The third album since Shirley Collins’s renaissance at 81 turns out to be the finest.

The result is a full-length debut that is acerbic, vulnerable and swaggering all at the same time.

It’s testament to the structure and variety of Once Twice Melody that it never lags over 18 tracks, its gradual release paradoxically validating the album format as one still worth surrendering to, totally.

Songs instantly familiar yet utterly unknowable.

Never quite settling where you think it might. Biffy Clyro can seem like two bands: a trio whose ringing Gaelic positivity and guitar bluster can shake a festival headline slot, and a gnarlier, more messed-up proposition.

At times it’s reminiscent of Zach Condon’s band Beirut, but Haiku Salut never stay still for too long, nuzzling up to folk one minute and slow drum’n’bass the next.

Giants of All Sizes is not an album to be filleted and squashed into playlists; it’s the sort of deeply serious and carefully crafted work that would sprout a beard and a cable-knit jumper if you turned your back on it for a second.

Thought-provoking words, lush instrumentation – what’s not to like?

It is deliriously easy to listen to, while hooking the mind, and never once taking the easy path through period pastiche.

The guests on Trouble Will Find Me are equally impressive (Sufjan Stevens, Sharon Van Etten), but the National, no question, are the real stars of the show.

It feels like a simultaneous (re)introduction to Lynn’s career, and a summing up, and makes for a worthy companion piece to Cash’s American Recordings.

The production here is both crisp and sinuous; ethereal indeterminacy trades off with crackling attention to detail.

The smoothness of Hval’s musical vehicle, this time around, allows her ideas to slip in softly, almost subliminally: humanity as a virus, technology’s role in romance, bereavement, panic attacks. It’s an eerie sort of euphoria, but no less of a rush for it.

At just 35 minutes, Phasor might not be as all-enveloping as his previous efforts, yet it offers enough scraps of melody and moments of wonder that you won’t feel cheated.

Perhaps Tempest’s greatest achievement is not to fall prey to the pressure for unnecessary revolution; her work sits more comfortably in the tradition of perfecting the groove, not changing it. That perfection might be illusion, but its pursuit can produce wonderful work, as it has right here.

All their little watermarks reappear. We get irregular time signatures, birdsong and other found sounds; long, wordless passages and tricksy skits; and an intoxicating confidence in their arrangements.

Dust is a record that is powerful, consuming, yet also strangely comforting.

Chasescene confirms Knox as a master storyteller, and is a record to settle into on dark nights, glad that you’re only a listener to its frightful tales.

Here, we have Hadreas’s desire to transcend his body and self--the no shape of the title--and glorious, inventive, shape-shifting music to match.

Best described as a punk with a keyboard and tunes to burn, Nomates has dug even deeper for Cacti, her songwriting broadening its reach. Her deadpan takedowns remain heroic.

For those expecting Malone’s all-enveloping instrumental embrace, the churchiness of the voices can startle. But the younger artist came to music through choirs, and the sorrowful grace of the words makes plain emotions she previously only implied.

An always thought-provoking record.

Although neophytes might struggle with Holley’s shruggy attitude to tunefulness--his free-ranging sound recalls, at different times, Tom Waits, Gil Scott-Heron or RL Burnside--a coterie of associates help to flesh out Holley’s non-linear storytelling into something more conventionally accomplished.

Everything feels like it is pulsating away within an amniotic sac – in a good way – as instruments wander across the songs, as though orchestrating themselves.

[A] short but highly intriguing record from Norwegian pop experimentalist Jenny Hval.

The result is a brief but serious retrospective treatment of five pieces, going back as far as 1958. There are two versions of Naima and three of Village Blues, but they’re all different, and every performance is complete, no odds and ends.

It’s a brave album, at times raw with anger.

The drawback here is not that Bruner hasn’t made the out-and-out pop album his narrative arc as an artist might demand. Nor is it that he is showcasing his conservatoire-grade talents. It is, perhaps, that he doesn’t sit with one emotion, be it high or low, for a sustained length of time.

An ambitious album (it comes with an 8mm film and several quirky videos) from a unique artist.

Springsteen sings brilliantly throughout, gritty on Hitch Hikin’, Orbison-operatic on the more elaborate pieces, and though the high notes can prove elusive, he retains the cadence of a born narrator. Brave and intriguing.

Densely layered and richly rewarding, Wildheart is further evidence that Miguel suits his outsider status.

This 73rd studio album stands out from the somewhat erratic output, a winning mixture of confessionals, nostalgia and humour, co-written with producer Buddy Cannon.

The record is a joyous listen, which will only be enhanced on their forthcoming tour, and a confident assertion of Ezra Collective breaking out of the once-restrictive jazz enclave.

With charged production that flits between old-school hip-hop, futuristic pop and even Latin, at 15 tracks it can feel diluted, but there’s no doubt cupcakKe is a potent MC on the rise.

If you’re looking for muted mystery, Jessica Pratt’s third album, as its title suggests, will enigmatically oblige.

Heady and rooted in lustful disco, this album proves that the singer is a cornerstone of contemporary pop.

Listen in and the lyrics soundtrack a mid-youth crisis ("I've been starting over for a long time," Cronin croons as the album opens), but not so as to dent the overall impression of an ozone high.

Owens’s is not the only voice elevating this album: Welsh legend John Cale contributes to the brooding Corner of My Sky. Alongside relationship breakdown and the death of her grandmother (the coolly arpeggiating Jeanette), climate apocalypse gets a workout too.

This is fine internationalist guitar music.

The greatest satisfaction is that she does not jump the shark: everything here is possible-sounding, humanistic and full of emotion; only slightly uncanny.

The closing Ragtime offers a happy ending of sorts, but this is too honest a record about unhappiness and grief to deliver a neat, redemptive conclusion.

There is a lot of heartbreak on Burn Your Fire For No Witness, as well as a lot of pleasing anachronism; a lot of hard-won resignation and what you might call stern vulnerability, a quality that Olsen shares with Joni Mitchell without sounding at all like Mitchell.

Sensitive and punchy as always.

Underpinning everything are the Watkinses themselves, especially the agile vocals of Sara, who outshines California art rockers Tune-Yards on a cover of their Hypnotized. But it’s not a competition, just a great night out with a ringside seat.

Too often, though, you’re left wishing for the thuggish bass and head-severing hi-hats of less cerebral dance music. There’s not enough food for the brain or fuel for the feet here.

There are sturdy melodies on the quietly charming Cosoco or Cálculos Y Oráculos, but even an apparently conventional song is soon transformed by her edgy and intriguing off-kilter soundscapes.

Although Yorke sounds refreshed, the results here don’t vary wildly from the Radiohead frontman’s instantly recognisable musical signatures, evolved over 20 years.

As if to underline his status as one of indie rock’s great eccentrics, Malkmus makes a decent fist of orchestral pop on the frisky, staccato-like Brethren, and severs all ties with conventional songwriting, revealing an aptitude for space rock (Difficulties/Let Them Eat Vowels).

Jazz tempos have always posed an implicit challenge to the 4/4 order, but this is an album that really wants its transmissions to be received.

Carner’s scuffed, wry flows grab you by the feels from the get-go and do not relinquish their grip.

It all makes for a multi-textured, multi-hued portrait of an artist who playfully seeks out the primary colours but remains very frank about the shade.

His 11th solo album doesn’t deviate wildly in tone from 2014’s Lullaby and ... the Ceaseless Roar. He’s backed once again by the Sensational Space Shifters, who artfully flesh out the rock and folk elements with splashes of bendir, oud and djembe.

Starring his voice and nimble guitar, with subtly dramatic instrumentation adding texture throughout, this is less a record than a dream state designed to wash over the listener in one sitting.

Set over gorgeous production, and serving as a comforting reminder to black sheep and ugly ducklings everywhere that it pays to be true to one’s full self, Negro Swan is a dizzying triumph.

This is 2017’s zeitgeist Notting Hill carnival soundtrack.

There remains a palpable feeling that with Coriky, one of American music’s foremost consciences is very much back in business.

Staples’s new album is much more personal and accessible than anything he’s put out before.

The fine line between euphoria and melancholy is negotiated brilliantly on tracks such as Can’t Do Without You.

Currents details a painful rebirth, but you’d never guess as much.

The album’s mix of soul, R&B, grime and trippy, jazz-tinged interludes is at times a little muddled, but Simz’s lyrical agility and deft rapping sit comfortably with a variety of production styles.

Written on keyboards rather than guitar, Pre Pleasure was recorded in Montreal with Marcus Paquin of the Weather Station; you can hear the uptick in arrangement and production in the painterly thrum of the instruments.

Its [The second track's] eerily distorted saxophone, a nod to Low, takes six minutes to surface, but then takes centre stage, a mournful motif subtly evolving over the next quarter of an hour. The multilayered title track, meanwhile, is a less immediate drone, but proves hypnotic well within its 17-minute timeframe.

Ruminating on everything from love, abusive men and her new dog, Joanie – even on an impressive instrumental number named after said canine – Sling is a generous, cinematic delight.

These are unanchored R&B songs for unmoored times, with Kelela’s alluring vocals holding fast, front and centre.

The emphatic playing of Hutchings’ more exhortatory bands (chiefly Sons of Kemet) has given way to a more impressionistic delicacy.

It can feel a little lacking in direction – honed down from more than 900 home experiments, it’s eclectic almost to a fault, though there’s enough to treasure among its dreamy meanderings.

It's not cutting edge, but it does mean business.

Their erudition, musical and lyrical, remains a pleasure, but what convinces on Modern Vampires are their beating hearts.

Refined and subtle, but with the right amount of bite (see the darkly hued True Story), Eternal Sunshine feels like a clearing of the emotional decks.

Tugging profoundly on bittersweet 60s soul and Motown, Heaven is a fine album.

Wiley is back, and with a banger. There’s no dud on this rattling tour de force.

This relatively curt 40-minute set--the Montreal multi-instrumentalists’ second recording since their lengthy hiatus ended in 2010--ranks among their most immediate.

In revving so hard, though, the Black Keys have perhaps left behind in the dust the subtleties that made Brothers such an intriguing ride.

The arrangements on Dream River are almost as eloquent as his lyrics.

She still struggles to throw off what must now be very tiresome PJ Harvey comparisons. That said, this is very much a resonant record, set in the here and now, with melodies to the fore.

Its songs, by southerner Randall Bramlett, don’t have the heft of Dylan or Simone, but prove a good fit for Lavette’s heart-on-sleeve vocals.

This is a record about coming home to yourself, about feeling truly alive, one with the added benefit of being stuffed with bangers and not overburdened by corny shredding.

Crazymad, for Me doubles down on CMAT’s self-knowing “too muchness” with a meatier sound and more vaulting ambition.

Unfortunately, Gordon’s spiky, staccato delivery is too often drowned in distortion and diminished by tune-dodging cacophony. So many songs, such as Trophies, are tense yet torpid, and when the airless intensity clears briefly on Shelf Warmer it’s too late.